


The Emperor Resurrected

by moreagaara



Series: The Emperor Revived [1]
Category: Warhammer 40.000, World of Warcraft
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood, Blood Magic, Canonical Character Death, Character Death, Cross-Posted on deviantArt, Crossover, Emperor Revived, Gen, Literature, Original Character(s), Originally Posted Elsewhere, Post-Canon, Posted Elsewhere, Sci-Fi, fan fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-12
Updated: 2019-04-12
Packaged: 2020-08-10 15:02:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20137384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moreagaara/pseuds/moreagaara
Summary: This is chronologically one of the first fanfics I wrote about WH40k, and it concerns (obviously) the resurrection of the Emperor of Mankind.  It also shows one of the first major deviations from the canon, which is that the Primarchs (including Rogal Dorn) were in fact the ancient brothers of the Emperor back when they were first born on ancient Terra (specifically in the Sumer/Fertile Crescent area).  There are 20 official Primarchs, so...big ass family.  Another major departure is that I gave the Emperor a fucking name, that being Daenus Chakamar, and he is the son of Crawyen Chakamar and Taiz'rothar, both of whom belong to kaibun-creations.  I did try to stay as loyal as possible to the canon otherwise, but this being an early work, there are probably some minor mistakes involved.People who own what:Games Workshop:  most of the WH40k stuff I dun wrote about (the emperor, rogal dorn, malcador, etc.).Blizzard:  Azeroth and the concept of old godskaibun-creations:  Crawyen (and Taizy, who doesn't appear in this)me:  the emperor's name and Videen





	The Emperor Resurrected

**Author's Note:**

> This is chronologically one of the first fanfics I wrote about WH40k, and it concerns (obviously) the resurrection of the Emperor of Mankind. It also shows one of the first major deviations from the canon, which is that the Primarchs (including Rogal Dorn) were in fact the ancient brothers of the Emperor back when they were first born on ancient Terra (specifically in the Sumer/Fertile Crescent area). There are 20 official Primarchs, so...big ass family. Another major departure is that I gave the Emperor a fucking name, that being Daenus Chakamar, and he is the son of Crawyen Chakamar and Taiz'rothar, both of whom belong to kaibun-creations. I did try to stay as loyal as possible to the canon otherwise, but this being an early work, there are probably some minor mistakes involved.
> 
> People who own what:  
Games Workshop: most of the WH40k stuff I dun wrote about (the emperor, rogal dorn, malcador, etc.).  
Blizzard: Azeroth and the concept of old gods  
kaibun-creations: Crawyen (and Taizy, who doesn't appear in this)  
me: the emperor's name and Videen

Pain. Pain was all Daenus could register. Even had his back not been broken, he doubted he would be able to move; he tried to edge his remaining arm forward and pull himself along the floor of Horus’ flagship, but his chest flared with a pain deeper than he had so far experienced. He would have screamed, but his windpipe was too badly damaged from the slash across his throat. Of course Horus had used his Talon for that.

_I’m not ready to die,_ Daenus thought, unable even to grimace, since Horus had also been kind enough to blast his face away with some sort of Warp lightning. _I can’t die yet…I have too much to do. _Not that he could do anything even if he stayed alive like this. Between his missing arm, ripped open chest—it was strange to know exactly what it felt like to have his heart kiss the floor with each beat—slashed throat, and broken back…he wasn’t going anywhere.

It wasn’t hurting quite so much anymore. On the one hand, Daenus was deeply relieved. On the other hand, he knew that wasn’t a good thing. _Shock. Dammit._

Someone entered the room; Daenus heard footsteps of powered armor on the steel floor. “Father!” they called, panicked. _Thank the ancients…Rogal Dorn. _It was taking much of his concentration just to breathe, just to use his blood magic to stop himself from bleeding out before Rogal got there. His heartbeats were starting to get irregular. _Not good._

Dorn rolled him over; Daenus’s vision wasn’t good enough to properly see his face. His remaining eye couldn’t focus. “Father…” Dorn started. At least Daenus could hear well. Clinging to consciousness as he had once before, so many millenia before, he managed to force his vocal cords to obey him.

“Throne…take me…Golden Throne,” he gasped out. He couldn’t manage more than a whisper, but it was enough. Dorn heard him. Daenus relaxed his grip on consciousness somewhat; his abused throat protested his use of it. His vision swam; they weren’t on Horus’ flagship anymore. Somehow Dorn was carrying him through the Imperial Palace, and it didn’t hurt. Daenus rather suspected that had more to do with shock than any care Dorn was displaying. He could feel his son’s panic.

_Hang on…Dorn isn’t my son. He’s the reincarnation of my brother. _He knew that, but it was still easier to think of Rogal—of all the Primarchs, even Horus—as his son. It was even true in a way. That was why he had never told them the truth. Perhaps if he had, Horus never would have fallen.

Perhaps if the Emperor had been better at his job, had explained everything to them, he wouldn’t have had to kill Horus or destroy his soul to save his nascent Imperium. Perhaps if he had told them of what had happened so many millennia ago, the first time Sanguinius had died…why did his brother have to be so self-sacrificing…

When had his Throne room gotten so dusty? And why did he suddenly feel stronger?

_Oh no. Malcador. _Daenus was able to open his eye just enough to see Malcador’s face, somehow bright and clear despite everything else remaining blurry. He felt his own soul grow stronger, even as Malcador’s flamed out. Determination to save his Emperor had led him to sacrifice his own soul and give it to Daenus. The weakened soul fused with his own before Daenus could stop it, and its remaining strength suffused his own.

Daenus/Malcador drew breath through their shattered throat, spoke as clearly as they could. The settings to put into the Throne to switch it from maintaining the shattered webway Daenus had wanted to make to unite the Imperium, before Horus fell, to maintaining the body of whoever was placed within it. Malcador gave them information for how to set the Throne to do so forever: input the maximum time, then have it automatically add one day whenever that time fell below the maximum time.

Daenus marshalled his own flagging strength, silently thanking the hero. More of a hero than Daenus had ever been, could ever be, for all he was stronger than Malcador. Malcador’s spirit tried to protest, but Daenus wouldn’t let him. He told those around him, even as they wired him into the Throne, what he wanted them to do. Fight Chaos. Fight the minions that follow it. End its threat against the Imperium. Destroy the ignorance it brought. Then mankind could truly be free to unite the galaxy.

Tall orders, but he believed in them. That belief could sustain him, he hoped. But he had exhausted the little strength Malcador had been able to preserve for him, and there was no more to tell the Imperium everything else he wanted to say. His body could no longer tolerate any further movement, even tiny ones. It relaxed despite his desires, and would no longer move.

Daenus allowed this; he did need to recover his strength. Until then, he could at least ensure the Astronomican didn’t fail; if it did, mankind was truly doomed. His body could sleep a while, and when he had recovered his strength, he would be able to fix it, and walk among his people once again.

Malcador was silent on that last point.

~~*~~

Days passed. At least it felt like days to Daenus; neither he, nor Malcador, nor any of the other souls that had joined them in that time knew how long it had really been. Malcador had fallen silent some time ago; Daenus wasn’t entirely sure why. He hoped it wasn’t because he had wholly consumed the soul, but some part of him suspected that was the reason. The other souls, when they first arrived, were too timid to speak to him, no matter how he welcomed them, tried to encourage them to remember themselves.

None of them would. Most simply plunged themselves into the whirling mass of the Emperor’s mind, fed their strength to his own. Daenus was much stronger now, strong enough, he hoped, to heal his body. The next few souls that arrived he set to the task of maintaining the Astronomican, as he had something to do before they could join with him.

Slaanesh was eyeing him greedily. Again. It wasn’t the first time he had fought the youngest of the Chaos Gods. Nor was it the first time he had fought the others. Once again he marshalled his strength to beat her (him? it?) back. Once again he forced her to the edges of her unholy territory, once again she tried to draw him into the place where she was strongest. Once again, he turned away. He was no fool.

Trusting the souls to continue holding the Astronomican steady, he slipped back into his body, to try and heal it. First he had to shift his awareness from the Warp back to his palace. For some reason, the people in the palace were moving at light speed, hardly remaining still long enough for Daenus to even attempt to speak to them.

He turned his attention to the Throne, thinking how odd it was that he could truly look at himself from an outsider’s point of view. Despair swamped him; if anything, his body looked worse than it had felt when he had been placed on the Throne. But he drew a deep breath, and gathered some of his power. He focused his power on his slashed left wrist, trying to coax the tendons to regrow, or at least to stretch enough that he could reattach them to the remains of his hand.

Nothing happened.

_Okay…maybe it’s not working because I’m an outsider looking in. _He stepped into his own body, expecting to feel again the pain he had felt when Horus had first injured him so badly. But he felt nothing. Only a single dim, stubbornly regular heartbeat, maintained by the gentle whirr of the Throne. Not even his lungs filled on their own, not really; the shallow breaths he drew were pushed into his throat by the Throne itself, where it supported his lolling head. No air passed his lips. His remaining eye hadn’t fully shut when he had passed out, and had dried out into uselessness. Daenus could feel no hunger, no pain, no need from his withered body; there was nowhere he could reconnect. Even focusing his strength, he couldn’t even manage to heal a single ripped tendon in his left wrist.

He stepped out again, and drew a deep breath, despair beginning to rise. No. He wouldn’t be giving up. Perhaps the problem was simply that he needed more power. Yes, that was it. Perhaps if he simply asked for twice as many souls, then in a few weeks, he would be able to heal himself. This thought buoying him, he returned to the Warp to maintain the Astronomican and allow the other souls to rest.

~~*~~

It wasn’t enough. It would never be enough. Years had passed, so it seemed to Daenus, and still he could not reconnect with his shattered, mummified corpse of a body. The damage was done, and Daenus simply couldn’t fix it. Strength wasn’t the issue; ability to affect anything outside of the Warp was.

Thousands of souls joined him every moment he sat beneath the light of the Astronomican. Thousands of souls, each having given their lives to support his own waning strength. Without them, Daenus doubted he even would be alive at the moment, Golden Throne or no. He had kept a few of the souls posted about the palace, to tell him if anyone who possessed blood magic (he had shown them the signature to look for using his own strength) crossed into the palace, and the area where he could roam. Which wasn’t far; the Throne room, the room where the souls were sacrificed to him, the room where the machine that interpreted his thoughts stood. That was all.

The machine that supposedly interpreted his thoughts didn’t work very well; he’d learned that through trial and excruciating error. He had to think very slowly and clearly for it to read him at all, and even then, it tended to pick up on his indirect thoughts. But even when it did work well enough to pick up on what he actually wanted to say, the people who read the idiot machine frequently misinterpreted what it said. After multiple instances of attempting to make the high lords of Terra hear him directly (usually by shouting that that wasn’t what he had said), he had given up on the thing.

Clearly the High Lords were going to claim the Emperor said whatever they wanted him to say, and there was no point in attempting to correct them. It was fortunate, one of the slightly braver souls mentioned, that he couldn’t affect anything outside of the Warp, or he would have broken the Emperor’s Tarot, as he called it. Annoyed, if pleased that at least one of the souls that fused with him (he had given up pretending it was anything else), the Emperor used a jolt of his power to throw a workstation across the room.

The effort had made the Astronomican flicker for just an instant. “Can too,” he muttered before working to stabilize the thing. The soul did not respond. The person to whom the workstation belonged blamed the incident on a psyker passing by, on their way to join the others being sacrificed to the Emperor.

Daenus buried his face in his hands; a whip of psychic power reduced an attacking legion of Tzeentch minions to ash. He didn’t even need to look to do it; a mere wave of his hand was enough. Likely he didn’t even need to do that, but the movement made him feel better.

Some hours passed, and one of the souls whispered to him that it had felt echoes through the Warp of blood magic, like what the Emperor wanted to know about. He nodded, thanking the soul, before it too dove into the maelstrom of thought that was his own amalgamated soul now.

A few minutes passed; more reports of blood magic in the Warp, like and yet unlike the Emperor’s own. Delays, attempts by the Chaos Gods to delay an Imperium ship as it made its way to Terra. Daenus used their inattention to himself to greatly weaken those of their forces he could reach in the Warp, ending that part of their attacks.

The ship made it safely, dropping out of the Warp. Daenus was currently engaged in a fight against Khorne, his least favorite Chaos god to fight, since he so frequently came close to winning through Daenus’ own history with him. He could spare no attention for the continuing, more excited reports from his souls of blood magic, or of a strange sort of Chaos that manipulated emotion.

When Khorne at last withdrew for the moment, Daenus could feel the signature of blood magic himself. He launched himself towards it, delighted to find that it was already near. Delighted further to see who it belonged to. Dad.

And if his father was near, his mother usually was too. He tried to speak to his father directly, but without effect. He tried shouting for his mother, who really should have been nearby, and would certainly have noticed his disembodied spirit the second she entered the palace, but she did not respond. Either she was sulking, or she wasn’t there at all. At last, in desperation, the Emperor turned to his Tarot, trying to make it at least hear him.

His father was talking to one of the Inquisitors, who was dragging his feet about letting him and the rest of his party in. Daenus couldn’t really blame the man, as they did look extremely odd, especially the one they had strapped to a cart of some sort. The one, he noticed, pausing by the Tarot, that was looking directly at him. Could that creature see him…?

He hardly dared to hope. It worked a tentacle free—the Inquisitor was saying something about how under no circumstances would he allow a Chaos beast anywhere near the Emperor, even if it had been an order to do exactly that—and released itself from the restraints that held it to the cart.

Daenus stepped a little closer. If this creature echoed in the Warp the same way he did, then perhaps—

Something had changed. He wasn’t sure what. There was another spirit, a much more powerful one than any of the other souls he had consumed, near to where he was, but it would not respond to him. Somehow, Daenus sensed, the body he was in belonged to that other, alien spirit. Somehow, Daenus was the one in control.

He spoke with effort, and his voice was even more strange than he expected, considering he was apparently piloting what might legitimately be a Chaos God. “Let my father in,” he said. The words reverberated oddly in the room; there was music behind it, emotion, barely constrained might. Might that was technically Daenus’s to command, but which he did not know how to use. He tried to avoid tapping into it, since he had no idea what it might do.

The Inquisitor wasn’t moving fast enough, so Daenus made him move. He meant to use a tentacle to throw him, but a head reacted instead. Not the head Daenus was looking out through, but another. How many heads did this creature have?

_Seven._

Not his own thoughts; the creature’s soul.

_And since you’re wondering, I don’t have a centralized brain like you’re used to either._

How the fuck could it read him so well.

_I’m surprised you’re coping so well in here, but please get out as soon as we’ve opened the door. _It directed his thoughts to a tentacle, instead of his old head, and allowed him to enter the code that kept the door to his Throne room locked.

Daenus obliged him in getting out as soon as they had crossed the door. His father could see the wreck of his body now; there was no need to explain. Exhausted, Daenus could only crawl to the Throne, where the sacrificed souls glimmered. Whatever that creature was, it had drained his strength badly. He dimly heard one of his Custodes explaining the Siege of Terra to his father; how Horus had broken him, but his spirit lived on and how they had kept his body alive, if only just.

The strength of the souls flooded into him. He sighed in relief and pushed himself back up. And then his spirit was wrenched by an outside force; he couldn’t help but howl even as he was pulled into his own body, unable to resist the healing his father was putting on him. Khorne surged forward, the scattered souls he hadn’t quite yet managed to absorb unable to stop him; a gateway for Khorne’s minions ripped open through the psykers who had yet to die and join him.

Through the blinding pain as his nerves reactivated after long years without activity, he felt the Chaos God meet an opposing force as mighty as himself. Daenus would have to thank whoever it was later; for now, he did his best to help direct his father’s magic to the worst of his injuries. The rent in his chest, the wound in his neck, the broken back…but his father did more than that.

Daenus hadn’t even been aware of the damage caused by the Throne only being able to feed him intravenously, but his father healed that. His missing eye was restored along with the rest of his face; his wrist was pulled back into position through newly repaired tendons. His missing arm—Daenus had by that point forgotten what it was like to have two arms, and barely used his right arm even in spirit form—shot forth from the empty socket that had once held it, and frantically turned the Throne’s life support off, before Daenus healed around it.

Someone caught him as he fell off the Throne; he gratefully accepted their support, trying to reorient himself. It felt as though his consciousness was splitting, centered around the Throne; some was drawn into the fight against Khorne in the Warp; between whoever was fighting him physically and Daenus’ own efforts, he was pushed back to his home, where he was too strong for Daenus to fight.

The souls of the psykers had to be attended to; Daenus barely even thought about what it was he was doing as a piece of his consciousness moved among them, collecting their essence, fusing them with himself. It was better than allowing Khorne to collect them, he told himself, even if what he was doing was deeply sinful. And this way, the Chaos that was starting to infect them would gain no foothold; Daenus knew well what Khorne in particular promised his followers, and knew those promises were empty. In him, Chaos could gain no traction, thanks primarily to Horus’s efforts all those millennia ago, and so any soul that was joined with his own would be protected.

But there were other places, all over the Imperium, which called to him; a piece of his consciousness went to each, and in most…he swore. Of course they were worshipping him. He debated simply using his consciousness to animate the statues, the stained glass images, the icons that depicted him and smashing up the joint, but reason took hold before he did. Surely the High Lords had a reason for disobeying his direct orders. Until then, the temples could stay.

He noticed many of the newly absorbed souls protesting him and his dislike of the temples; all had anecdotes of how going to the temple had saved them when all else had failed. Some because knowledge of what the Emperor had sacrificed for the Imperium had pulled them through a personal darkness or trial, some because knowledge of what the Emperor had done to fight Chaos had strengthened their resolve when Chaos had struck close to them, or struck them directly. Others, especially the newest, those which Khorne had used to pull himself through, stated that sheer faith in the Emperor’s power had protected them from the worst of the Chaos god’s power.

Eventually Daenus quieted them by promising to get more information about the Imperial Creed, as they called it, before taking any action against it. He rather suspected, given how strongly they all felt about it, that it would wind up being a stalemate.

He recalled a piece of his consciousness from possessing another dead body, a woman named Miraleia, who had come with his father; how it had gotten in there in the first place, he wasn’t sure. He remained slightly distracted as he briefly experimented with his newfound abilities, and quickly learned that their extent was only limited by his own opinions of his power. He knew, from ages-old experience, that that level of power was granted only to gods, which meant that somehow, in the time he had been interred on the Throne, he had become a god. Which meant that it must have been longer than his estimate of five years.

In no way was he prepared to learn that it had been fifteen thousand years since the Horus Heresies.  



End file.
